Abstract
Humans can quickly and accurately recognize objects within briefly presented natural scenes. Previous work has provided evidence that scene context contributes to this process, demonstrating improved naming of objects that were presented in semantically consistent scenes (e.g., a sandcastle on a beach) relative to semantically inconsistent scenes (e.g., a sandcastle on a football field). The current study was aimed at investigating which processes underlie the scene consistency effect. Specifically, we tested: (1) whether the effect is due to increased visual feature and/or shape overlap for consistent relative to inconsistent scene-object pairs; and (2) whether the effect is mediated by attention to the background scene. Experiment 1 replicated the scene consistency effect of a previous report (Davenport and Potter, 2004). Using a new, carefully controlled stimulus set, Experiment 2 showed that the scene consistency effect could not be explained by low-level feature or shape overlap between scenes and target objects. Experiments 3a and 3b investigated whether focused attention modulates the scene consistency effect. By using a location cueing manipulation, participants were correctly informed about the location of the target object on a proportion of trials, allowing focused attention to be deployed toward the target object. Importantly, the effect of scene consistency on target object recognition was independent of spatial attention, and was observed both when attention was focused on the target object and when attention was focused on the background scene. These results indicate that a semantically consistent scene context benefits object recognition independently of the focus of attention. We suggest that the scene consistency effect is primarily driven by global scene properties, or “scene gist”, that can be processed with minimal attentional resources.
Highlights
The human visual system is extraordinarily adept at detecting, categorizing, and naming objects embedded in natural scenes
When participants attempted to recognize an object in a briefly presented scene, the semantic consistency of the background affected perception of the sought-after object in such a way that a semantically consistent background led to higher accuracy in recognizing the target objects, even though the background was not directly relevant to the task
A strong consistency effect could still be observed with stimuli that were matched across conditions on visual feature and shape overlap between object and scene
Summary
The human visual system is extraordinarily adept at detecting, categorizing, and naming objects embedded in natural scenes. The properties of this ability have been studied extensively (Henderson and Hollingworth, 1999; Bar, 2004; Torralba et al, 2006; Fabre-Thorpe, 2011; Wolfe et al, 2011). Prior research has shown that the availability of scene context (i.e., a semantically consistent background) facilitates the detection and recognition of objects within that scene (Biederman et al, 1982; De Graef et al, 1990; Joubert et al, 2007; but see Hollingworth and Henderson, 1998). A better understanding of these mechanisms is crucial for gaining further insight into how objects and scenes are interactively processed by the visual system
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